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[InflatableMouse]

Oke, I have this silly idea and I have no idea if its possible and if it is, how to accomplish it. I've been staring at settings thinking and I'm not sure about it but I'm going to try a few things with linked zones. There might be a much easier way I'm not aware of?

My front speakers aren't the best when it comes down to the lows. Up to 50, 60hz its fine but below that they do something but it sounds more like how I sound in the morning (that's how you know you're getting old btw; your arse talks before your mouth in the morning ).

Anyway, when I was using the Xonar this was easy. I used JRiver to to mix to 2.1 and used room correction to remove bass from the fronts from 80hz down.

Now that I have my DAC I seem to be stuck with 2 channel stereo only. The DAC is hooked up to EXT IN on my Denon receiver. EXT IN happens to be multichannel, so in theory I could loop any channel from the analog out from the integrated soundcard or from the Xonar to the SUB from EXT IN. The thing is, how do I setup MC to use 2 soundcards?

I was thinking I could setup 2 zones, link them and have one feed the DAC and the other provide the sub channel? When I try 2 link 2 zones, MC crashes  ?. But maybe I shouldn't be using 2 ASIO drivers at the same time or theres something else I'm missing? I was thinking when I use DirectSound or Wasapi instead of ASIO its going to be out of sync and I have no means to measure by how much.

Thanks for any help!

[mwillems]

I haven't tried it lately, but when last I tried to use two soundcards to effectively increase the number of channels out (by linking zones like you describe), I never could get the two soundcards in sync.  And it wasn't just a question of being slightly out of sync, they'd start in sync and drift farther apart as the song went on.  Which, especially with the growing popularity of async DACs, makes sense: unless the two DACs have their clocks synced to each other somehow, the computer can't control their timing.

Zone link was completely unusable in this application fo rme (and it wasn't designed to do this), and the conventional advice is to make sure you have one DAC that has enough channels out for your application. If you don't want to part with your two channel DAC, lots of subs have a built in analog crossover for exactly this purpose (don't know if yours does or doesn't).

If you figure out a way to get it synced so that it works though, I'd be excited to hear about it. 

[InflatableMouse]

Right. Makes sense and I'll spare me the trouble of fiddling with it then.

I'm not sure I can use the sub, I need to see if it has 2 inputs. I think it does (L+R) but I'm not sure if its such a good idea to use L for Sub channel out on the receiver (watching movies) and R for another line out to get it to work with the DAC.

I'm not even sure how to get L+R from the DAC to the sub ... ?

Thanks.

[nwboater]

Check out Option 1 in Mojave's post here: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=80165.msg546127#msg546127

You could keep your DAC for L & R and buy a cheap DAC for the Sub from MOBO SPDIF. Figuring out how to route the channels in MC may get interesting. I may want to do something similar in the future, except using my old spare Behringer DCX2496 as the DAC.

Would appreciate hearing how it works if you try it. And especially how you end up routing channels.

Cheers,
Rod

[InflatableMouse]

Unless I misunderstand, it means linking zones. What I understand from Mojave's post is that he did that with outputs from the same card so they would share the same clock and would therefore stay synced.

Getting a 2nd cheap DAC would likely create the sync issue mwillems and mojave warned about.

It shouldn't become a complicated story though. If it was relatively easy to do with linked zones or something than it would be nice. It's not like I can't live without it.

So I think I'll just forget about it .

Thanks for the suggestions though!

[nwboater]

After re-reading his post a few more times I think you are right. He did mention using the SPDIF from the MOBO, but did not mention trying that, only the SPDIF from the SAME soundcard. And logically I don't really think the clock on your soundcard would be synced with the MOBO SPDIF clock.

So sorry bout that!

Cheers,
Rod

[InflatableMouse]

No worries, I appreciate the feedback.

[mwillems]

No worries, I appreciate the feedback.

SPDIF signals carry the clock along with, so if your primary DAC has an SPDIF out, you could conceivably daisy chain a second DAC that way, which is part of what what I meant by "unless the two DACs have their clocks synced to each other somehow."

I think what mojave was describing was using the SPDIF output on the same interface to get a few extra channels.  I did that for a while with an M-Audio DAC that had two analog outs and a stereo SPDIF out.  I zone-linked the M-Audio's analog and digital outputs, and then hooked up the SPDIF out to a second stereo DAC that had an SPDIF in. In that case the M-Audio's analog channels remained synced to the second stereo DAC's outputs, effectively giving me four channels of output.  But that only worked because the parent card's clock was controlling the output rate of both the analog outs and the SPDIF signal, effectively imposing it's clock on the second DAC.  

There's nothing magical about SPDIF that would result in a zone-link sync, unless one interface is controlling both outputs, if that makes sense.  It looks like you came to the same conclusion above, I just wanted to confirm based on my own experiments.

[InflatableMouse]

yeh, exactly. Thanks mwillems.

I just thought of something dirty. The DAC is hooked up to EXT IN which is multichannel analog input. The receiver doesn't touch this, its just amplified that's all (while all other analog inputs are processed (A/D-D/A for Auddyssee Room EQ). But I have outputs as well, for tape for instance.

Here's the dirty part: what would happen if I grabbed an interlink and hooked a tape out to the SUB channel for EXT IN (assuming EXT IN front channels are routed to the tape outputs)?

This is probably not a very smart idea though .... 

[mwillems]

yeh, exactly. Thanks mwillems.

I just thought of something dirty. The DAC is hooked up to EXT IN which is multichannel analog input. The receiver doesn't touch this, its just amplified that's all (while all other analog inputs are processed (A/D-D/A for Auddyssee Room EQ). But I have outputs as well, for tape for instance.

Here's the dirty part: what would happen if I grabbed an interlink and hooked a tape out to the SUB channel for EXT IN (assuming EXT IN front channels are routed to the tape outputs)?

This is probably not a very smart idea though .... 

I'm not sure I fully understand, but if all you're doing is physically duplicating the fronts to re-route them to the sub, it might work assuming your sub has an internal low-pass crossover.  If your EXT IN is analog (an RCA cable or something), you could probably accomplish something similar (and less fiddly) with a Y-cable or two. Hook up your left and right DAC outputs with Y-cables, and then route one branch of each Y to your Left and Right inputs on your receiver, and route the other branches of the Y to the sub inputs, whether on the EXT IN of the receiver, or, if your sub is powered, on the sub itself.  If there's only a single Sub RCA input, just attach another Y-adapter (reversed) to the other end, which will sum the signals.

It's not necessarily pretty, but a Y-cable/Y-adapter remains the "lowest tech" way to duplicate a line level signal, and as long as you use a reasonably well designed cable, and your DAC has plenty of juice, it shouldn't affect volume levels/noise performance very much.

[InflatableMouse]

I thought about y-cables, but I'm afraid it might degrade the signal coming from the DAC.

What I did was simple. I routed pre-out to the sub channel input of EXT IN.

It seems to work although I had to boost the sub channel level of EXT IN by 15dB to get something audible.


I'm also afraid that EXT-IN is somehow routed to pre-out so I've created a loop (this was my main concern when I said my idea was dirty). I tested it and I can actually hear very quietly some noise from the sub when there's nothing playing (and volume on mute). THis might simply be the noise floor from the sub as it's own volume was maxed out though. I didn't think to pull the plug, I might try that. The Denon may also have a protection against this kind of looping, I don't know. It could also be that the sub channel from EXT IN isn't passed to pre-out, again, I don't know.

Anyway, it does work. When I tested I gradually increased the volume.

Other thing is bass is not filtered from the mains.